For those who don’t know me, I am a CPA living and working in Bozeman, Montana. I received a phone call a couple of weeks ago from a man who was interested, he said, in engaging my services. We set up an appointment.

He is running a new start up company that specializes in helping small businesses obtain credit. It’s an interesting concept – a multi-leveled service that would build up credit ratings, set up web pages, and overall help these unemployed carpenters and plumbers and bank executives become credible.

He didn’t want my services. He wanted my client list. He said I would be doing them a favor by hooking them up with him. End of story.

Here’s what is most interesting – up until June of 2008, my client-to-be was in the mortgage business – he ran a storefront. He said he left while the leaving was good.

I doubt the foresight to leave before the crash – I think he’s just trying to land on his feet. But here’s the bottom line – the flimflammers that were enticing people into ARMS, offering mortgages and refinances to gullible and unqualified people (and pocketing exorbitant fees), are the same people who are always with us. In the late 1990’s, they were probably doing dot.com startup companies. When things are slow, they sell used cars. They also run small casinos. They cannot resist the lure of the fast buck.

Now that the mortgage business has gone belly up, they are looking for new scams. Buyer beware.

From Andy Borowitz:

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama’s appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday witnessed the president-elect’s unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama’s decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it “alienating” to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language.

“Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,” says Mr. Logsdon. “If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.”

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, “Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate — we get it, stop showing off.”

The president-elect’s stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

“Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can’t really do there, I think needing to do that isn’t tapping into what Americans are needing also,” she said.

[I’m feeling lazy today, and a little self-congratulatory as I watch Joe Lieberman, pro-war Democrat, have the last laugh again. The following piece was written in January of 2007, and I wouldn’t change a word.]

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I’ve been suspicious of the Obama parade from the beginning – it’s been my experience that ‘attractive’ Democrats whom the media fawns over and regard as safe can usually trace their roots back to the Democratic Leadership Council, otherwise known as the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.

Obama’s no easy case, though. There are messages in the smoke.

Alexander Cockburn, as left as left can be, has written a couple of pieces on Obama. This was before the media discovered him. That’s a recent phenomenon.

Here’s Cockburn:

It’s depressing to think that we’ll have to endure Obamaspeak for months, if not years to come: a pulp of boosterism about the American dream, interspersed with homilies about “putting factionalism and party divisions behind us and moving on.” I used to think Sen. Joe Lieberman was the man whose words I’d least like to be force fed top volume if I was chained next to a loudspeaker in Camp Gitmo, but I think Obama, who picked Lieberman as his mentor when he first entered the U.S. Senate, is worse. I’ve never heard a politician so desperate not to offend conventional elite opinion while pretending to be fearless and forthright.

That’s right – Joe Lieberman is Obama’s mentor, and Lieberman brags that Obama picked him, not the opposite.

Cockburn also notes that Obama, around the time that Murtha was making a stink about Iraq, spoke before the elite of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Democrats fled Murtha, few with more transparent calculation than Obama who voyaged to the Council on Foreign Relations on November 22, there to ladle out to the assembled elites such balderdash as “The President could take the politics out of Iraq once and for all if he would simply go on television and say to the American people ‘Yes, we made mistakes'”, or “we need to focus our attention on how to reduce the U.S. military footprint in Iraq. Notice that I say ‘reduce,’ and not ‘fully withdraw'”, or “2006 should be the year that the various Iraqi factions must arrive at a fair political accommodation to defeat the insurgency; and , the Administration must make available to Congress critical information on reality-based benchmarks that will help us succeed in Iraq.”

Smooth as syrup. There’s a wave of discontent in this country, voiced in the November elections, that we want out of Iraq – no redeployment or scaleback, but o-u-t. No worthy politician can ignore this. But the war from the beginning has been an elite undertaking with unstated objectives. Americans have only been cajoled and frightened into following, and are seeing more clearly now.

It is going to take a politician of considerable skill to 1) heed to public demand to get out, and 2) keep us in. The media, subservient to power as always, will glom on to any politician who can serve those objectives. So, for now, Obama is their man.

[Obama] lobbed up the first signal flare during the run-up to his 2004 senate race, when his name began to feature on Democratic Leadership Council literature as one of the hundred Democratic leaders to watch.

The DLC doesn’t necessarily pre-select candidates, but they do keep an eye out for possibilities. Obama has been on their watch-list for some time. Now that they see his sex appeal, they may rally behind him. He could be Hillary without the polarizing effect, a real possibility to hold the office.

Obama has voted to close filibuster on both of Bush’s Supreme Court selections, to re-up the Patriot Act, for “tort reform”. He’s sent up plenty of signals that he could be Republican-lite enough to be ‘electable’ – code word for no threat to power.

Obama is one of those politicians whom journalists like to decorate with words as “adroit” or “politically adept” because you can actually see him trimming to the wind, the way you see a conjuror of moderate skill shove the rabbit back up his sleeve. Above all he is concerned with the task of reassuring the masters of the Democratic Party, and beyond that, the politico-corporate establishment, that he is safe. Whatever bomb might have been in his head has long since been dis-armed. He’s never going to blow up in the face of anyone of consequence.

There will be other candidates testing the wind. Tom Vilsack, another DLC guy, might catch on. Anyone of the left need not apply – Feingold has already ascertained that there is no support among those who matter for a man who really would get us out of Iraq, who really would change our health care system, who really cares about campaign finance reform. We’re pretty much stuck with the DLC, sex appeal, and no substance.

Obama had his fingers stuck in the wind as always. He bends to every breeze, as soon as he identifies it as coming from a career-threatening quarter. This man is no leader.

Check it out. (Rated R, for revealing).

This is refreshing – he actually shows some respect for science.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Rob Natelson has lined up with others to take a shot at Obama supporters who are investing messianic qualities in the new president. There’s something to be said for that. Cult of leadership is not a new phenomenon. Many of us noticed that Americans also invested superhuman qualities in George W. Bush after 9/11. That was fear speaking, however. The new followers are preaching hope. They are probably just as naive.

Nonetheless, Natelson’s criticisms of Obama are off the mark.

Obama had one of the thinnest resumes of any major Presidential candidate ever, but supporters have convinced themselves that he would not only govern brilliantly, but ”transform America.”

I think Obama brings impressive credentials to the table. For one, his educational achievements are stellar – Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude from Harvard. People are pooh-poohing that now, but those Latin words on parchment separate him from 99.99% of us. Few could have achieved what he did while in school. He then went on to community organizing, staying in touch with common folk, as opposed to most Harvard grads who head for Washington or Wall Street. In addition, he taught constitutional law, served in the state legislature, and the United States Senate. That’s a good start for a relatively young man. He’s a far cry from what we’ve had in office – a bright man with huge potential – one who has shown that he can organize, lead, and inspire. I find his resumé to be quite impressive.

People who claim to be against hate-mongers have blinded themselves to a record of associations that would have induced them to indignantly repudiate anyone else.

This is beneath Mr. Natelson. Over the years Obama has met thousands of people, had conservations with them, agreed and disagreed as a man of independent thought would do. I’m glad he’s been exposed to the thoughts of people on the left, including the thoughtful bomber Bill Ayers. Most people don’t take the time. To say that he’s been sullied by association is McCarthyism. That’s a word we bandy about, but it’s a tried and true technique for smearing people. It’s propaganda. I wonder if we went through Mr. Natelson’s background, dredged up every association, if we could find one or two that could be thrown in his face. Probably – if not, I’d say he’d led a sheltered existence.

We’ve had eight years now of a man who insulates himself from every outlook but his own. Now let’s see where we can go with a man who knows that there are more than two sides to every issue.

Supporters have convinced themselves that a politician with a record of cooperating with the Chicago machine is going to clean up Washington.

A man comes home from work, opens the closet to hang his jacket and finds a naked man standing there. “What are you doing here?” he asks. The man says “Everybody has to be somewhere”.

Merely coming from Chicago, living and working there and having success, should have no more bearing on his performance in office than if he came from Wasilla. Mr. Natelson’s point is no point at all. He’s reaching.

Now the gush of ga-ga really floweth over with breathless comments about how Obama’s IQ is the highest of anyone to occupy the White House, etc. etc.

I don’t know what Obama’s IQ is – but I know this: I am tired of being governed by ordinary people with ordinary smarts. People like Bush had to rely on the brains around him for policy, and he didn’t even have the good sense to being in people who disagreed with him. Smart people are not the answer – smart people with humility can lead effectively however. So stand back, Mr. Natelson, and let us do an experiment here. We’ve done it the other way. Now we’re going to try a smart guy at the helm.

Mr. Natelson offers some words of support at the end of his post. He’s not so much down on Obama as his followers. He thinks they are cultish, and that Obama has encouraged this behavior. I’ve seen some of that too. It’ll wear off. I’m already put off by all of the Clinton people and Rahm Emmanuel – the fact that he felt the need to appoint a “progressive liaison” for his transition team, meaning progressives need not apply for other positions. My antennae are already up – I’m already suspecting a Clinton-like triangulator. But I’ll give him a few more days.

I see Obama as a pragmatic intellectual. The closest I can come in comparing him to other presidents is Woodrow Wilson. I hope he does better.

Salon has run an interview with Bill Ayers, the poster child of the McCain/Palin campaign – read it here. It was very much worth my time.

Ayers notes that he has become the symbol of the anti-war movement of the 1960’s, and Jeremiah Wright has become the civil rights movement. The right has reduced everything down to manageable size – something they are good at.

Here’s a passage on his violent activities:

I imagine two groups of Americans. One slightly off the tracks and despairing of how to end this war and penetrating the Pentagon and putting a small charge in a bathroom that disables an Air Force computer. An act of extreme vandalism, but hard to call, in my view, terrorism.

Meanwhile, another group of Americans — also despairing, also off the tracks — walks into a Vietnamese village and kills everyone there. Children, women, old men. They kill every living thing, even livestock, and burn the place to the ground.

And the question is, What is terrorism? And what is violence?

Indeed it was hard during the campaign to listen to McCain, knowing of the violence he had inflicted on Vietnamese people, and Palin, with her head full of silly putty, and not think that the American public had internalized one of the most violent and criminal chapters in our history, Vietnam, and trivialized it.

The Minnesota recount, if allowed to go forward without interference by the parties, will be a good test of optical scanners.

The funny thing about Sarah Palin is that she thinks she is helping herself by doing all of these interviews. The more she talks, the more we know about her, the less her appeal. She will never overcome those initial negative impressions of her – she will only reinforce them. She will always have a small cadre of supporters – those on the religious right who do not value clarity of thought or academic achievement. But the simple truth is that she is not qualified for a high leadership position – she could spend her next four years at Harvard Law, and she still wouldn’t muster up. She doesn’t have the chops. You can put lipstick on a pig …